One in four families are taking grandparents away this summer. Good idea or
guaranteed disaster?

Sun, sand, sea and… stretched out on the lounger next to me on the charming French Ile de Ré, Grandma. Eighty-nine years old, quite fond of a Silk Cut purple and in full possession of all her mental faculties. Also, bluntly spoken, with a lovely turn of phrase (“Well, we were sitting there like plums…” as she once complained) and altogether very engaging company. In short, as one in four families are now discovering while taking their grandparents on their summer break, the perfect companion for a week’s holiday. Now that I’ve managed to get her here.

We poked around in the local market (apricots got the Grandma thumbs-up; crates of slithery live eels didn’t); walked along the shore, looking out towards the oyster beds; ate croissants for breakfast and crêpes for tea; and pottered around, soaking up the blazing, vision-saturating blues and whites of the landscape. It was idyllic; it was lovely; but, goodness me, it wasn’t easy prising her out of Yorkshire, on to a plane and over to France.

This trip first came up on the phone. We were chatting about tennis. My maternal grandmother, Myra Miller, is a big Roger Federer fan, so much so that I once had to talk her out of tripping him up with her walking stick to get his autograph. “Old ladies can get away with anything,” as she rather terrifyingly pointed out.

There was a thunderstruck silence, followed by an excited denial that she would do any such thing, then she hung up. Later, Mum called to say it was a bloody silly idea, I didn’t realise how much Grandma had slowed down in the past year, what a struggle she now found simple tasks, and how easily she got tired. Plus, she claimed, Grandma had said she would rather I spent the money on buying her a new television.

She then threw up a smog of other objections involving passports, insurance and the fact that Grandma gets up a lot in the night and needs to be able to make herself a cup of tea at 3am if necessary. There was clearly an unarticulated fear underlying Mum’s resistance. A little probing revealed it: she was worried going on holiday would make Grandma die.

The practical difficulties, I soon discovered, were relatively easy to smooth away. The journey had to be painless, so that Grandma didn’t fret about it in advance, or get exhausted on the day, but I longed to take her to the coast. She’d last seen the sea on a grey day in Whitby, several years ago. I fantasised about sunshine, a blue sea and bluer sky. The Ile de Ré, off the coast of La Rochelle, was perfect. It’s a kind of Gallic Hamptons: quiet, small, filled with white-washed houses, salt-flats to the north-west, a swoop of sandy beaches running along one coast, 10 villages to explore and more than 60 miles of cycle lanes.

It’s easy to reach, too. Jet2 flies there direct from Leeds-Bradford airport, half an hour’s drive from Grandma’s house. (Southerners can get there from Southampton.) From La Rochelle’s tiny airport, which had us dispatched with our checked luggage within half an hour of touchdown, it was a shortish cab ride over a glorious 3km road bridge to the island, so we didn’t even need to hire a car: a good thing as I’m an appalling driver.

As an unexpected bonus, the passport – Grandma hadn’t left England since a trip to Malaga about 30 years ago – which we feared would be another burdensome expense, turned out not to cost a penny. Those born before September 2 1929 are entitled to a free passport “in grateful commemoration of their war efforts” as part of a benevolent scheme introduced in 2004.

Mum found an insurer specialising in cover for the over-65s and those with pre-existing medical conditions. It helped that Grandma, who manages on her own in a three-storey house with steep stairs, has never been seriously ill, though it still wasn’t cheap (around £100 for a week) and Mum had to bite her tongue when asked if Grandma had smoked a cigarette in the past six months. “I should think she’s probably had one in the past six minutes.”

As for Mum’s anxieties… they began to melt away once she heard concrete plans and saw pictures of the house I’d found to rent, about 50m from the sea and half a Grandma-walkable kilometre from the village of La Flotte, with its daily market and pretty harbour. Mum was also anxious that the rest of the family might feel she was being irresponsible but, after an encouraging phone call from her sister, called me to say, “Yes, all right. But I think I ought to come too.” And so there were three of us.

It was a wonderful week. Some of the highlights:

Grandma’s bewilderment at airport security procedures and her response when she was asked to remove her cardigan: “That’s fine, as long as you don’t ask me to take anything else off.” “No, that’s next week,” replied a smart official, raising an eyebrow. “Happy hour.”

Then there was the day we hired bikes and cycled round the island with Mum while Grandma had a snooze. I did try to get her on the back of a tandem. “I’m not into that, I draw the line there,” she said, as if cycling were some sort of deviant fetish.

Best of all, taking our six o’clock G&Ts to drink on a bench at the end of the lane, overlooking the sea, where Mum and I got very giggly as Grandma recounted the story of the time she went to the supermarket with her pensioners’ shopping group and Alan the minibus driver careered into a ditch, distracted after one of them dropped a walking stick on the floor.

More seriously, it made me quite emotional to see how well Grandma was treated by the people we met. Perhaps it was because we were on holiday, so more engaged and engaging ourselves, but it seemed to me that the French show more respect towards older generations. Grandma was paid attention to, gently flirted with, looked after, looked at and noticed everywhere we went.

Waiters in cafés caught her eye; passers-by stopped to address her as she sat on a bench, breaking the walk between house and village with a rest; and our taxi driver was so chivalrous, as he helped her into the high front seat of his 4x4, that I had to elbow Mum in the ribs to stop her interfering: “Leave it. She’s being looked after by a gentleman.”

As for Grandma, she said she’d had a ball, and loved everything from the exciting feeling of taking off in a plane to being cooked for every night for a week rather than having to do everything for herself.

Most of all, I think, it was nice to spend time with each other, by the sea and in the sun. And when we got back from holiday, Dad had managed to get her television working anyway. So happily I never had to find out whether, in the great reckoning, that really was what she would have preferred all along…